Doing my usual Ceos - Sothis passenger trips (I earn 7-10 million per trip). I have almost A-rated my Anaconda, so I will continue investing into upgrades. I currently only have the FSD engineered, so I guess I'll either dig deeper into engineering or do Guardian technology next. I'm also planning on a trip to the centre of the galaxy, but that's later on.

So after about 6 months long expedition into Black (Yay, dah muneyh!) I've decided to dust off my combat skills.
Could have gone better, I guess, but at least I practiced ILS station approach with a broken canopy.
In the hindsight picking a wing of three Elite ships as my fist target was probably too optimistic of me.

Nonetheless, I've earned a couple million in bounties, last night, so I'm gonna call it a success.
It's incredible how much you lose in terms of reaction time and general precision after six months of lazywork and reading star charts.

I was just idly out, found some WW and HMC's and got about 1.2m for them. Not bad as I was only randomly trying to find interesting geysers. When I handed this in, my ranking shifted by 0. Ah well, I'm half way through Ranger so expected slowness.

I then switched ships, did an averagely juicy source and return and then wanted to checked where I was combat wise.

I was just idly out, found some WW and HMC's and got about 1.2m for them. Not bad as I was only randomly trying to find interesting geysers. When I handed this in, my ranking shifted by 0. Ah well, I'm half way through Ranger so expected slowness.

I then switched ships, did an averagely juicy source and return and then wanted to checked where I was combat wise.

Bummer! I'm now a bona fide murderer with a bounty waiting for my notoriety to drop.

I was in a low res with a Conda, killing pirates, getting combat rank and scavenging the mats they leave after I kill them. I have fitted only beam lasers with G5 efficient engineering. I also have a +5000 MJ shield. Just bring a load of collector limpets, park the ship and wait for the pirates to scan me. Then I rotate towards them and once they show up as wanted, I press the trigger until they crack. The reason why I "park" with my speed reduced to 0 is that the limpets then can scavenge parts from several ships at a time. I don't even bother retracting the cargo hatch. Basically I use the ship as a tanked turret. Money, mats and rank. Small ships are just a quick zap, large ships takes a wooosh. Rather efficient

The problem arose when this Python showed up. I didn't wait until the ship scan finished and just started shooting: When he then showed up as clean a split second later, I stopped shooting, but it was too late. Next, all hell broke loose, but thanks to my shield I managed to high wake to a random system, where I'm now waiting, coping with my bad conscience. I'm a murderer now. Never thought it would come to that...

I killed the ship. He was low on shield and even though I just hit him for (what felt like) half a second before realizing my mistake that took out the rest of his shield and his hull. All beams pack a punch against NpCs. I haven't seen a rebuy screen for some time. I normally go to haz res, but since I was only looking for mats for a trade, i took the low res as it was close to the trader.

My notoriety has vaporized, so now I just have to learn to live with having killed someone innocent. Guess the leason learned is that when you kill, sometimes you'll kill innocents. Well, back to getting those mats, I am

This one made me rub my chin in thought. I was on a planet getting a good signal on the scanner - sounded like a "bweep" like a very short chirp from one of the Clangers (if anyone can remember them!). As I approached, I saw as you can see in the shot below. However, there was nothing to scan or scoop. It looked like wreckage of some sort but I wondered why the scanner was bleeping when there was nothing there. Any ideas, CMDRs?